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This Conclusion presents some final thoughts. The Conclusion indicates that this book's detailed discussion on redaction criticism, historical and literary criticism, and other approaches hopes to have provided supplementary information for the interpretation presented here to complement scholarly criticism in the twentieth century.

‘The Fitting-Attitude Analysis Revised’ is devoted to a challenge to the fitting-attitude analysis (FA analysis) that arises from the logical consequence argument (outlined in Chap. 7). This argument shows that the version of FA analysis defended in this work has the unwelcome consequence that whatever is good for someone is also, necessarily, non-relationally good. However, as the discussion evinces, an advocate of FA analysis can meet this challenge. In effect, what is needed is a modification of the standard way of formulating the FA analysis of final impersonal value. Combining this revised FA version of final impersonal value with a novel way of understanding final non-relational value provides a plausible way to handle the logical consequence argument. The chapter also discusses three related issues. (i) It outlines a reductio of the standard version of final goodness; (ii) it explains why combining a normative and an attitudinal approach does not, in the end, serve the needs of the FA advocate. Finally, it (iii) introduces a kind of case in which we would intuitively agree that something is good for person a, but which, intuitively, is such that few or no one would think they had a reason to favour what was considered good for a (except a). Such examples allegedly showcase why the book’s proposed analysis is incorrect. Eventually, it is explained why this kind of case does not have this implication.

Any fitting-attitude (FA) analysis which understands value ultimately in terms of reasons and pro- and con-attitudes will have limited wiggle room if it is to respect the kind of radical division between good and good-for that earlier chapters have outlined. Essentially, its proponents can either introduce two different normative notions, one relating to good and the other to good-for, or distinguish two kinds of attitude, one corresponding to the analysis of good and the other corresponding to the analysis of good-for. ‘The Logical Consequence of Fitting Attitudes’ outlines why the latter, ‘attitudinal’ approach is preferable. Unfortunately, the attitudinal approach faces a challenging problem: the logical consequence argument. According to it, the attitudinal approach has the unwelcome consequence that whatever is good for someone is also, necessarily, non-relationally good. That is bad news—especially if you are a value dualist. The next chapter (Chap. 8) is devoted to resolving this issue.

This chapter examines the relations between patterns of causes and outcomes. The popular way to phrase Niels Bohr's principle that the validity of every conclusion depends on its source of evidence is to write that scientists assign a probability to the validity of each statement in accord with the evidence cited to support it. Statements that refer to exactly the same observation can have more than one validity if they are based on different evidence. It is useful to distinguish among the validity of a statement about nature that is based on certain observations, the truth of a conclusion that is based on the coherence of a logical or mathematical argument, and the rightness of a moral proposition based on a feeling.